After calls for justice by gay groups
across the country, a Wyoming prosecutor announced that he would seek the
death penalty for the accused killers of Matthew Shepard, a gay college
student who was murdered in a vicious and widely publicized incident of
gay bashing. Queer Watch noted that calls the execution of Shepard's killers
would be done in our name unless we, as a community, took a clear stand
against the death penalty.

NAMBLA issued a statement against
capital punishment in January (see the full text of the statement, below).
Following our statement, eleven large organizations, including the National
Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Lambda Legal Defense and New York City's Anti-Violence
Project issued a joint statement against capital punishment. Nevertheless,
the Human Rights Campaign, the largest advocacy organization for gays and
lesbians, refused to join in that statement.

As a Wyoming prosecutor seeks to
execute two men accused of killing a gay college student, the case of an
openly gay man on death row in Texas demonstrates that opposition by boy-lovers
to capital punishment is more than a principled stance -- it's also an
example of enlightened self-interest.

Calvin Burdine was convicted of
capital murder and sentenced to death by a Houston jury in 1984. An amicus
brief in support of his federal court petition for habeas corpus
filed by the Gay and Lesbian Project of the American Civil Liberties Union
argue that Burdine's constitutional rights were violated by the extreme
homophobia that permeated his trial. Among the more egregious examples
was the prosecutor's argument to the jury that putting a gay man in prison
is not punishment but is, instead, akin to putting a kid in a candy store.

The trial court also decided that
the jury could use a 1970 consensual sodomy conviction as proof the Burdine
would be a danger to the community in the future. Details of the 1970 conviction
have disappeared from court records, but some believe that Burdine's conviction
stemmed from a sexual relationship with a teen-age boy.

Burdine was represented during his
trial by Joe Cannon, a public defender. Cannon failed to object to having
jurors who openly admitted to anti-gay bias. Elsewhere he agreed with the
prosecution argument that being sentenced "'to a penitentiary certainly
isn't a very bad punishment for a homosexual." It's said that the
defense attorney slept through important parts of the trial. The jury foreman
from Burdine's trial has submitted an affidavit in court asserting that
Cannon used slurs such as "queer" and "fairy" in court papers to describe
his own client.

Burdine's execution was stayed,
and a hearing will be set on the merits of his habeas petition.

Statement in Opposition to the
Death Penalty

In light of Wyoming prosecutor Cal
Rerucha's decision to seek the execution of two men charged with the murder
of Matthew Shepard, and in light of the pending execution of Calvin Burdine,
a gay man in Texas, the North American Man-Boy Love Association announces
its opposition to the death penalty. We call on all gay/lesbian/bi-sexual/transgender
organizations to end their silence and publicly denounce capital punishment,
the spearhead of the "criminal justice" system. It is the means by which
the state impresses people with its cruelty; it victimizes the poor; and
it obscures the state's inability to prevent murder and other serious crime.
Executions are a simplistic solution intended to deflect action on core
social problems.

Whether accomplished by electric
chair or hanging, gas chamber or lethal injection, the death penalty in
the United States comprises three distinct phases. Its victims are first
marginalized, then demonized and finally executed. Candidates for the death
penalty are drawn from those pushed to the margins of society by race,
class or sexual orientation. Throughout trial and sentencing, they are
portrayed as less than human, as monsters, as individuals outside the family
of man. Only then are they offered up for slaughter. All members of the
gay community, like people of color and the poor, can recognize that process
of marginalization and demonization.

NAMBLA's humanitarian ideals and
progressive goals are incompatible with the use of capital punishment under
any circumstances. Barbarian punishments cannot be made palatable by any
specific methods of implementation, nor by the severity of the crimes that
trigger them. Such punishments are the hallmark of societies bereft of
a genuine social conscience. We are especially offended at the current
attempt to desensitize citizens to the contemplated execution of children
in capital cases. All organizations who share our philosophy of love and
liberation are of a single mind with NAMBLA in abhorrence of the death
penalty.

At this moment -- when the state
proposes to kill two men in the name of the gay community -- it's incumbent
on all of us, and especially on the organizations that claim to represent
us, to state our opposition loud and clear!